Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to computer-related and/or assisted systems, methods and computer readable mediums for creating and optionally automating intellectual property analyses, e.g., claim charts; and sorting, organizing, reporting and/or providing analysis documents in connection with the analyses.
Description of the Related Art
Many corporations are focusing on their intellectual property assets as being quite valuable. Hence these companies strive to develop large intellectual property portfolios, and indeed spend time and money on these assets. There is a concomitant pressure to leverage and/or better manage these portfolios of intellectual property assets. As a result, a great deal of emphasis has been placed on better ways to analyze the value of a portfolio, better processes for managing the portfolio and better strategies for creating opportunities to extract value from the portfolio.
One of the many ways corporations analyze their intellectual property assets is by analyzing the validity of the intellectual property asset, or by comparing the intellectual property to their own products or products of another company. Preparation of the comparison or analysis, such as in a claim chart, is painstaking, though portions may be rote. Each individual analysis or comparison is discrete.
Perhaps because the individual analyses are discrete and painstaking, various attempts have been made to analyze the relevance of intellectual property documents as a group, or to automate portions of the analysis process. Some aspects of conventional systems are illustrated by way of example in FIG. 33, also described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,665,656, Carter (expressly incorporated herein by reference). Carter provides an example illustration, in a table, of a rank-ordered output of correlating information related to an asset (e.g., infringement or invalidity references related to a patent) after performing a search. The displayed information 3301 includes a list of retrieved documents, such as potentially invalidating or infringing references 3305, a relevance ranking 3302, a user ranking 3304 and other optional information fields 3303. In this particular illustrative example, the target document input from the user is labeled Patent A. An ontology builder can parse the terminology within a target patent (or other document), determine relationships between terms in the document, and determine which terms in the document are more dominant than others. There is a high correlation of the target document to itself, thus, the first entry in the displayed information table 3305 is the target document Patent A. The relevance ranking for Patent A is 1.000, the highest correlation rank. The relevance ranking is a correlation indicator between a comparison of the ontology for the target document and an ontology created for the listed document. In addition to correlation, the user may rank the documents based or other criteria, such as company owner, date, perceived importance, or other factors. In the particular example, various technical papers, patents, data books, and other information sources such as news articles, SEC filings, data books of competitors web sites, IEEE industry standard documents, and the like are listed.
Another aspect of conventional systems is illustrated in FIG. 34, also described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,038,561, Snyder et al. (expressly incorporated herein by reference), concerning analyzing and displaying information contained in multiple documents employing both term-based analysis and conceptual-representation analysis, for, e.g., analyzing patent texts, such as patent claims, abstracts and other portions of a patent document. Snyder illustrates the steps to produce an S-curve for analyzing documents from Company A verses documents from Company B. The process depicted in the flow chart 3401 begins with the generation of all scores (either term or concept) from a claim level data set A versus data set B analysis 3450. For example, the patents from Company A compared with the patents from Company B on a claim by claim basis. These scores are in the range of 0.0 to 1.0. Next, in step 3452, all claims are sequentially numbered such that the first claim from Company A is 1 and the last claim from Company B is n and all claims from A precede all claims from B. In step 3454, for each claim index I from Company A the closest claim from Company B is found, and the pair (I, S-1.0) where S is the similarity score of A compared with B is recorded. Next, in step 3456, for each claim index I from Company B the closest claim from company A is found, and the pair (I, 1.0-S) where S is the similarity score of A compared to B is recorded. Finally, in step 3458, all pairs are sorted in increasing order of second coordinate and displayed on a plot where the x-axis represents the claim index and the y-axis represents the claim score. The result is a plot in the form of an S-curve where the bottom part of the S represents claims unique to company A; the middle part represents claims with possible overlaps between the two companies, and the top part represents claims unique to Company B.
FIG. 35 illustrates other aspects of conventional systems, also described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,774,833, Newman (expressly incorporated herein by reference). Newman is an example of syntactic and semantic analysis of patent text and drawings. Newman discloses a method for processing patent text 3501 in a computer, including identifying boundaries of parts of patent text 3502, selecting a section of the patent text 3503, loading at least one of the parts of the patent text into a working memory 3204, analyzing at least one of the parts of the patent text 3505, and reporting results 3506 to a user. Patent text sections generally include the title, the field of the invention, background of the invention, summary of the invention, brief description of the drawings, detailed description of the drawings (or preferred embodiments), claims, and the abstract of the invention. Identification of claim elements can be accomplished with a combined syntactic and semantic analysis of the claim wording. Alphanumeric drawing data can also be compared to patent text. Newman can loop through more sections 3508, selecting the next section 3509 until done 3507. Newman's invention can be coupled to work with a word processor program. Newman can recognize and report, e.g., claim dependency specific characteristics of patent text.
While these management and analysis techniques have resulted in more efficient use of attorney resources, and more targeted intellectual property filings and funding, relatively little has been done to take advantage of current computational technologies, the integration of data resources (largely through the Internet), and better knowledge-based software systems to handle aspects of intellectual property. As a result, no process or product exists for handling the full range of intellectual property functions in an automated manner.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the market for a comprehensive system that incorporates tools that will give the intellectual property professional the ability to work in all aspects of their practice area using automated, analysis tools to assist them in their practice.
Moreover, many corporations have a wide range of intellectual property assets, but no technique to make associations between assets. For example, a particular license may implicate several patents. Conventional systems do not support the association of the intellectual property assets, and they certainly do not support a memorialized explanation of the association. Even if a user is able to determine a few related intellectual property assets, the problem of determining associated intellectual property assets grows geometrically more complex with the number of intellectual property assets.
Accordingly, I have determined that the complexities affecting the analysis, use, accessing, researching, presenting, etc., of intellectual property and related information make it extremely difficult for a customer to integrate information in various scenarios. I have determined that a customer might want to create or provide an analysis of intellectual property (e.g., a patent claim chart, a trademark comparison chart, a copyright comparison chart, etc.) for multiple products, patents, and/or other intellectual property; and a customer that has, e.g., multiple analyses such as claim charts might be able to leverage an analysis of intellectual property coverage. A customer might desire to automate some or all of the process of creating a claim chart (or other infringement or comparison analysis), in particular as it relates to other intellectual property and/or other analyses. In addition, a customer might want to determine, e.g. which patents (or other intellectual property documents, including trademarks, copyrights, etc.) and/or analyses are implicated by and/or related to, for example, a particular component, a particular product, a particular technology, a license for a particular product, a company, a corporate division, a type of service, or other, perhaps company-specific, criteria. I have further determined that a customer might want to ascertain the intellectual property documents and analyses that are related on multiple levels, optionally including details relating to the relationships. There exists a profound need for such a method and/or system.